If polar bears could protest, they would protest about me.
The long distance relationship can often be frowned upon with most, normal, well educated and sensible people opting to wait until next summer to see how things goes. Naturally i am one of the people that decided to go against everything my mind, my friends and my family thought and am currently in one. So is my girlfriend (hi Ruth).
But aside from the many many lonely nights sobbing into ones pillow and masturbating profusely from bored and starvation from human contact what are the other impacts of this? I guess this article is not just an educational read for those interested in the effects of pollution but a way for me to kill some time waiting until the moment I can see my girlfriend again.
So is it true? Do long distance relationships rape our forests, plunder our land and stamp on our polar bears? Let’s find out.
So the basic flight from New Zealand to the UK return will produce around 4200kg of carbon dioxide (4.2tonnes) which incidentally is the same amount that an average American produces in two years of his existence. It would take 1 acre (or three quarters of a football field depending on what units you were brought up with) of trees just over a year and a half to consume the amount of carbon dioxide emitted during the flight.
So how would this carbon dioxide affect the world? Well we all know that rising carbon dioxide levels are causing global warming. The thing is this isn’t the only cause of global warming because of course, if there were lots of trees to capture the carbon dioxide then we wouldn’t have a problem. The thing is that as well as CO2 emissions rising trees are also being cut down at an alarming rate. Just remembering that a return flight from the UK to New Zealand and back again would take one acre of forest 2 years to balance out we can also say that it would take 2 acres of forest one year to offset the same transcontinental flight. Right, so we have understood that a twenty-four hour flight would take a whole year for a two acre patch of forest to offset we might be shocked to learn that two acres of rainforest (apparently the best sort of forest) gets cut down EVERY SECOND. Never fear though, because for the incredibly cheap sum of £41 one can have their carbon emissions offset by having trees planted in Kenya. Hurrah!
So all this additional carbon dioxide and reduced numbers of trees, what is it all doing? Well, this causes (maybe not from one plane but combined with all the rest) an increase in the CO2 in our atmosphere. Through a lot of sciencey mumbo jumbo that, at three in the morning I don’t have the effort nor knowledge to write about, this causes the atmosphere to heat up.
Meanwhile, in Siberia, due to the increased temperatures, permafrost that has been frozen for many decades or even centuries is beginning to melt. Unfortunately within this permafrost is methane. Lots and lots of methane. So for every ton of CO2 released the earth will increase in temperature by very little, but the combined effect of many tons of CO2 being release can be devastating and cause a noticeable increase in temperature. The scary part here is that methane is a slightly more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Say, about twenty times more effective. So until relatively recently the amount of methane being ejected into the atmosphere had been relatively low as the permafrost has remained, well, permanent. However more recently it has begun to melt causing an observable increase in methane in the air (then again, it isn’t something I have personally noticed)
Moving on, this methane because of its great ability to globally warm could be the start of the end of our polar ice caps. High levels of methane such as those released from the permafrost have not been seen before and so it is unknown really to what extent the ice caps will suffer. The ice caps melting would almost definitely spell the end for many polar animals. Likely to go extinct are the polar bears who rely on the sea ice to hunt and mate.
Drawing a rambling, boring and mostly pointless article to a close it is in conclusion that the long distance relationship can be a contributing factor to the decline of the polar bear. And whilst cutting out the middle man by stomping on polar bear cubs would indeed be a quicker and less prolonged way to reach the inevitable outcome it would mean that I would be getting less sex than I do already. Which, I believe, would be bad all round.
